Saturday, October 24, 2026

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Tower Semiconductor Deep Dive

Tower Semiconductor’s low-loss photonics chips halve lasers in 1.6T optical modules, supporting a $680 million annualized photonics run rate and customer wafer prepayments through 2027.

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Can Boost Run $BRUN borrow the $527-686M it needs for H2 2026 without selling stock? CFO Erik Guckel said on the Q2 call that $BRUN is working on new ways to finance the build: “We continue to innovate on financing structures beyond the equipment financing approach used to date and expect to provide additional color and progress on this over the next quarter.” The October 8 prospectus amendment names asset-backed securitizations (bonds backed by its GPUs and customer contracts) and rated parent-level debt as new forms of financing $BRUN expects to access. But I found no new facility, lender, or term sheet in its filings or press releases from August 14 to October 16. Founder and CEO Andrew Karos acknowledged on the Q2 call that there’s “a big gap in the market right now” in financing for customers without investment-grade credit. $BRUN’s named customers are private AI startups without investment-grade ratings, so its contracts are harder to borrow against. For comparison, $NBIS’s first secured loan on July 17, $775M at 2.50 points over SOFR (a short-term benchmark rate), was backed by GPUs running under a contract with an investment-grade customer. Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, alone accounts for $157.2M/year, 52.3% of what $BRUN’s disclosed contracts should bring in by year-end, and was still in talks to raise $5-6B as of early September. I found no announcement that it closed the round through October 16, so lenders financing its GPUs are also betting that the round closes. Karos also mentioned $NVDA’s AI Compute Partnership (AICP), a program NVIDIA launched in July to backstop GPU clouds’ clusters with its investment-grade credit, for a share of their revenue. However, NVIDIA paused some of its AICP deals over antitrust concerns, the Wall Street Journal reported on August 27. NVIDIA said the program is still in place, but The Information, a tech news site, reported on October 5 that NVIDIA is rethinking its revenue-sharing deals with GPU clouds. Still, lessors funded 79.5% of the H1 2026 build for GPUs already rented out on contracts worth ~1.4x their cost, so I believe $BRUN most likely borrows the $527-686M without selling stock. The Q3 report (mid-November) will show how much $BRUN leased in Q3. If lessors funded 70% of the H2 2026 build instead of 79.5%, $BRUN would need $199-259M of its own cash for the build, more than its $191.8M of pro forma cash. Covering the ~$7-67M gap and keeping three months of the ~$221M of 2027 payments in cash would take a $62-122M stock sale. At $8.89/share, the sale would mean 7.0-13.8M new shares, 8.4-16.4% of the 83.8M outstanding. So the stock at $8.89 depends less on demand or the book $BRUN has signed than on whether it can finance the next ~$1B of GPUs without selling shares at beaten-down prices.

Margin Call

Petrobras’s Morpho-1 well revived hopes that Brazil’s Equatorial Margin can become a major new oil frontier after hydrocarbons were…

Our Views on CoreWeave

CoreWeave's financial statements point to a business model familiar to the authors after a closer review of the AI infrastructure company.

Capital Wars

CoreWeave’s $35 billion to $39 billion 2026 spending plan relies on debt as unsecured yields reach 15%, making its GPU cloud expansion a…

Putting bear cases to rest

Medpace authorized $1 billion of buybacks through 2028 after Q3 revenue rose 8.5% to $716 million; service revenue grew roughly 12% as…

CLF · long

Cleveland-cliffs INC

Cleveland-Cliffs is pitched as a long on underappreciated earnings power, with more than 90% return potential over six to nine months.

MYR Group q3’26 Earnings Preview

MYR Group’s Q3 2026 preview cites data-center and power transmission demand, with long-term service agreements supporting margin growth and…

Mosaic, Part One: The Story

Mosaic’s history traces the 2004 Cargill-IMC merger and the phosphate and potash mines that shaped NYSE: MOS.

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